The Discussion

I've always thought Solitaire could benefit from managed code. The scalability on the current versions is awful. I mean, we ended up having to distribute it via CITRIX to get the kind of performance we were looking for.

I mean, for instance:

Drop solitaire on a server and share the app. Then use some load testing software to simulate 200 users. It crashes. Can't even handle 200 users!

What's the point I say!

So, Chris totally has the write idea, let's recreate this in managed code AND with vector graphics so that the graphics AND the application are scalable.

Right, by 2006 when most of the world finally weans itself from a debilitating Solitaire dependency, out comes "Longhorn Solitaire"...

Chris mentioned something about a migration away from bitmap graphics to vector based images. I recall something about it being standard throughout the UI of "Win2006"? And of course, SVG has been a threat for some years now, though I have yet to see an actual
application where its critical.

I can see where the traditional advantages to using vector images arise (scalability, compression, processing, etc) but as graphics processors explode in capability, won't there be a tradeoff in high-res image quality? Especially as digital photo formats become
ubiquitous..I just see the trend evolving toward photo-realism, in textures, and UI elements. The same effects easily achieved in vector based imaging can be realized with bitmaps as processing power becomes a non-issue.

Are you using *.wmf or a new file format? There are all sorts of current wmf issues I don't even want to get into...

The file format for scaleable vector graphics is XAML (which you can learn all about on
the Avalon page of the Longhorn Developer Center). The increasing processing power in the video cards is what's enabling all kind of fancy graphics and visualization, of which scaling
vectors is a tiny part. And bitmaps don't scale very well, especially when compared to how well vectors scale.

And you should get more than your fill of Chris vids in the coming days. : )

Let's hope that as Solitaire 2006 progresses, the source code for it is made available. Perhaps Chris will blog about his progress (what he's learned, problems he ran into, cool stuff he found and wants us to try out).

This is good. Though I hope there is someone at Microsoft working on adding small useful apps to Windows. A good example would be things that are in the Office suite which should be imported so they are OS-wide. Like the character map shortcuts for special
characters so I could press ctrl-e-^ (i downloaded a freeware program which mimics some of the functionality), or the clipboard bar that has a list of clippings. All this would be easy to implement, I hope someone will work on it.